The Origins of Australian Rules Football, 1858 to 1859

The origins of Australian rules football sit in Melbourne across two winters, 1858 and 1859. The usual starting point is a letter from Tom Wills published in Bell's Life in Victoria on 10 July 1858, calling for a football club and a committee of three or more to draw up a code of laws. A month later, on 7 August, Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College played the first organised match of the new game at Richmond Paddock, forty a side. The following May, four men sat in a hotel in East Melbourne and wrote down ten rules.

That is the documented skeleton, and it is not seriously contested. What is contested is where the ideas in those ten rules came from — specifically whether Aboriginal football games played in Victoria, known collectively as Marn Grook, influenced a code written by men who had all learnt football at English public schools. This page sets out the evidence on both sides without pretending it is settled, because it is not.

Everything that follows happened before there was a competition, a professional player or a stadium. For where the game went afterwards, the guide to the Victorian clubs and the guide to the clubs outside Victoria pick up the story.

Melbourne in the 1850s

Context matters here, because the game was shaped by a specific city at a specific moment.

The Victorian gold rushes of the 1850s multiplied Melbourne's population within a few years and filled it with young men, many of them British and Irish, most of them with money and time. The colony had cricket clubs, a racing calendar and a large amount of unenclosed parkland immediately beside the town. The Melbourne Cricket Club already existed and its ground already sat where the MCG stands today.

Two practical facts follow from that. First, there was open ground available in enormous quantity, which is why the game grew to fill a space rather than being squeezed into a rectangle. Second, working hours in Melbourne were shortening — the eight-hour day campaign was won by Melbourne stonemasons in 1856 — which gave a working population Saturday afternoons to fill. A sport that needed a large paddock and a free afternoon fitted the city exactly.

Cricket is the third factor. The men who wrote the first football rules were cricketers, the first football was played on and around cricket grounds in the winter, and the sport was conceived partly as a way of keeping cricketers fit between summers. That relationship never entirely broke: Australian football is still played on cricket ovals.

Tom Wills

Tom Wills was born in New South Wales in 1835 and raised on his family's property in western Victoria, on Djab Wurrung country near Gariwerd, the Grampians. He was for a period the only European child in the district, and is reported to have spoken the local language.

At fourteen he was sent to England and educated at Rugby School, where he played the school's football game and became a very good cricketer. He returned to Victoria in the mid-1850s as one of the best cricketers in the colony, and later became a central figure in colonial cricket — including as coach of the Aboriginal cricket team from Victoria's western district that toured England in 1868.

His later life was difficult and ended badly. But the man who wrote the 1858 letter was a young, well-connected sportsman with the standing to be listened to, direct experience of an organised English football code, and a childhood spent in a part of Victoria where Aboriginal football was played. All three of those facts are relevant to the argument later on this page, and all three are documented.

The letter of 10 July 1858

Wills wrote to Bell's Life in Victoria, a sporting newspaper, proposing that cricketers form a football club for the winter months and appoint a committee of three or more to draw up a code of laws.

Two things about the letter are worth noting. It did not propose a game; it proposed an organisation and a process. And it explicitly assumed that the laws would have to be written from scratch, rather than adopting an existing English code — which is telling, because Wills knew the Rugby School game perfectly well and did not suggest using it.

The letter is short and there is no manifesto in it. It is a practical suggestion from a cricketer about winter fitness that happened to start a sport.

1. 110 July 1858Tom Wills writes to Bell's Life in Victoria proposing a football club and a committee to draw up a code of laws.
2. 27 August 1858Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College begin the first organised match at Richmond Paddock, forty players a side, umpired by Wills and Dr John Macadam.
3. 3Late 1858The match resumes on later dates as a best of three goals contest and is eventually declared a draw in early September.
4. 417 May 1859Wills, William Hammersley, J B Thompson and Thomas H Smith meet at the Parade Hotel in East Melbourne and draft ten rules.
5. 5Later in 1859Thompson publishes the rules in the Victorian Cricketer's Guide as the laws of the Melbourne Football Club as played at Richmond Paddock.
6. 6The 1860sOther clubs form, adopt the Melbourne rules with local variations, and the code begins to diverge and be amended by agreement.

The documented sequence from the 1858 letter to the publication of the first rules. Dates are as recorded in contemporary newspapers and in the Victorian Cricketer's Guide.

The 1858 school match

On 7 August 1858, boys and staff from Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College met at Richmond Paddock — the parkland beside the Melbourne Cricket Ground, now called Yarra Park. Each side fielded forty players. Contemporary accounts describe goals set roughly 800 metres apart.

It was played as the best of three goals, in the manner of Rugby School matches, which meant it could not be finished in an afternoon. The match resumed on later dates through August and was declared a draw in early September, having produced very few goals across the whole period.

Wills umpired for Melbourne Grammar. Scotch College chose Dr John Macadam, a chemist and public figure after whom the macadamia nut is named. The two schools still play an annual match, the Cordner-Eggleston Cup, which is usually described as the oldest continuous football fixture in the world.

Why this match, and why historians hedge

The 1858 match is routinely called the first game of Australian rules football, and it is reasonable shorthand. It is also not strictly accurate, and the people who study this are careful about it.

The rules had not been written when it was played. It was closer to an agreed hybrid between the football games the two schools already knew, refereed by two men making decisions as they went, over a period of weeks. Calling it the first match of a code that did not yet exist is a retrospective judgement.

What it does mark is the first organised, publicly reported, agreed-rules football match in the colony played by the group of people who then wrote the code. On that basis it earns its place, and both schools and the AFL treat it as the founding fixture.

The meeting of 17 May 1859

On 17 May 1859, four members of the Melbourne Football Club met at the Parade Hotel on Wellington Parade in East Melbourne, a pub kept by James "Jerry" Bryant and close to the cricket ground.

The four were Tom Wills, William Hammersley, James Bogue Thompson and Thomas Henry Smith. Hammersley and Thompson were journalists and cricketers; Smith was a teacher at Scotch College who had learnt football in Ireland. Between them they knew the Rugby, Eton, Winchester and Cambridge codes, and none of them proposed adopting any of those wholesale.

They produced ten rules. Accounts of the meeting note that it was conducted over several drinks and that the explicit aim was a simple code with as few laws as possible. Thompson published the result in that year's Victorian Cricketer's Guide as the laws of the Melbourne Football Club as played at Richmond Paddock, 1859.

The ten rules of 1859

Summarised in modern English, and in the order they were written:

Rule	What it said
I	The distance between the goals was to be decided by the captains
II	Captains tossed for choice of goal, and the losing side took the centre kick-off
III	A goal required the ball to be kicked fairly between the posts without touching a post or a player
IV	Play took place in a space 200 yards wide between the goals, with kick-off posts set 20 yards from the goal posts
V	If the ball went behind goal, a player could bring it 20 yards in front and kick it towards the opposite goal
VI	A player catching the ball directly from a kick could call mark and take a free kick, with no opponent allowed inside that spot
VII	Tripping and pushing were allowed while the ball was in rapid motion or held, but hacking was forbidden
VIII	The ball could only be handled when caught from the foot or on the hop, never lifted from the ground
IX	A ball out of bounds was thrown back in at right angles from where it crossed the line
X	The ball could never be thrown while in play

The wording above is a paraphrase. The original text is nineteenth century sporting English and the surviving printings differ in small details, so go to the AFL's published transcription or the Victorian Cricketer's Guide if the exact phrasing matters to you.

• Ground and goal posts20.0%
• Scoring20.0%
• Restarts and boundaries20.0%
• Handling the ball30.0%
• Contact10.0%

A classification of the ten published rules by subject. The grouping is this page's own, applied to the documented rules rather than measured from any source, and rules dealing with more than one subject have been assigned to their main purpose.

Show the numbers

What the ten rules of 1859 covered

Item	Value
Ground and goal posts	2
Scoring	2
Restarts and boundaries	2
Handling the ball	3
Contact	1

What the 1859 code deliberately left out

The omissions did more to shape the sport than the inclusions.

There is no offside rule. Every English football code of the period had one in some form, and the Melbourne drafters left it out. That single absence is why Australian football uses the whole ground, why players run into space in every direction, and why the game looks nothing like football or rugby to a newcomer.

There is no limit on the number of players, no defined duration, no fixed ground dimensions beyond the 200-yard width, and no scoring system beyond the goal. Behinds — the minor score for a near miss — did not exist yet.

There is no provision for a professional player, a club competition, or an umpire's authority beyond what the captains agreed. All of that was added later by people who found they needed it.

What survives into 2026

More of the ten rules survives than you would expect after 167 years.

The mark, rule six, is intact in principle: a player who catches a kick cleanly gets an unimpeded kick of his own. It is the single feature that most distinguishes Australian football from every other code, and it was there from the first day.

Rule ten, the ban on throwing, survives as the handball — the ball must be punched or hit from the hand rather than thrown, which is the reason disposal in this sport looks the way it does. Rule eight, the ban on picking the ball off the ground with the hands, is the ancestor of the modern rules governing possession at ground level. The prohibition on hacking in rule seven is the ancestor of the modern approach to below-the-knees contact.

What has gone is most of the structural material. Ground dimensions are now standardised within a range, quarters are timed, scoring includes behinds, and there are eighteen players a side. The 2026 season removed one of the oldest surviving elements of all when the AFL abolished the centre bounce, a restart that had been part of the game since 1887, in favour of an umpire throw-up.

• 10Rules written in 1859
• 4Men who drafted them
• 40Players a side in 1858
• 28Days from letter to first match

Structural counts from the documented record of 1858 and 1859, not measurements of anything. The 40-a-side figure is from contemporary reporting of the 1858 school match and applied only to that match.

Marn Grook: what is documented

Marn Grook, also spelt marngrook, is a term used for traditional football games played by Aboriginal people in the region now called Victoria. The following is documented in nineteenth century European sources and is not in dispute.

Robert Brough Smyth's The Aborigines of Victoria, published in 1878, quotes William Thomas, who held the office of Protector of Aborigines in Victoria, describing a game he witnessed around 1841 among Wurundjeri people east of Melbourne. James Dawson's Australian Aborigines of 1881 describes a game he called football, played between two sides with a ball made of possum fur or skin, kicked and caught.

The games described involve high kicking, catching a ball in the air, and large numbers of participants. They were played in Victoria, including in the western district. That much is on the record and no serious historian contests it.

Also documented: Tom Wills spent his childhood in the western district on Djab Wurrung country, in the period when such games were played there, as effectively the only European child in the district.

Marn Grook: what is disputed

The disputed step is the inference from those documented facts to influence on the 1859 code.

The case against rests principally on silence. Wills left letters and edited two cricket guides, and in none of that material does he mention Aboriginal football. Gillian Hibbins, who has written extensively on the sport's origins, has made exactly this point and argues that inferring influence from geographic proximity, without any statement from the person supposedly influenced, is not a standard historians would accept for any other claim. She also notes that the ten rules closely resemble the English public school codes the four drafters knew directly, and that the mark in particular has clear English antecedents.

The case for rests on the combination of proximity, plausibility and the limits of the colonial record. Wills was there, the games were played there, and he was a child in a household that had daily contact with Djab Wurrung people. Supporters of the connection also point out that a colonial gentleman in 1859 had every social reason not to credit an Aboriginal source, so the absence of a written acknowledgement is weak evidence of absence.

Research by Jenny Hocking and Nell Reidy, published in Meanjin in 2016 and drawing on material in the anthropologist Alfred Howitt's papers and correspondence, established the presence of Aboriginal football in the western district in the relevant period — a point that sceptics had previously said was unproven. That strengthens the circumstantial case. It does not, on its own, document influence.

The AFL's 2019 statement and the reaction

In 2019 the AFL, through its then general manager of social policy and inclusion Tanya Hosch, issued a statement saying that marngrook, described as a high-marking game played in Victoria's western districts before European settlement, undoubtedly influenced what is now understood as the modern AFL code.

Several football historians publicly disagreed — not with the existence of marngrook, but with the word "undoubtedly". Their objection was that the AFL had taken a contested historical question and issued a corporate finding on it, and that the documentary record supports "may have" rather than "undoubtedly".

Others argued the AFL's statement was overdue recognition, and that the historical profession's insistence on documentary proof systematically disadvantages oral history and Aboriginal accounts. That argument is about historical method as much as about football.

There is also a place claim attached: the western Victorian town of Moyston, near where Wills grew up, has been advanced as the true birthplace of the game, and there have been calls for the AFL to give that greater recognition.

How to talk about the origins honestly

If you need a formulation that is defensible, this one works.

Australian rules football was codified in Melbourne in 1859 by four men who had learnt football at English schools, and the code they wrote most closely resembles those English games. Tom Wills, the man who started the process, spent his childhood among Djab Wurrung people in a region where Aboriginal football was played, and it is entirely possible that this shaped what he thought football could be. There is no document in which he says so. The AFL has stated that marngrook influenced the code; a number of historians consider that wording stronger than the evidence supports.

That is longer than a slogan and it has the advantage of being true. The versions that go wrong are the two absolutist ones: that the game was simply copied from Aboriginal football, and that Aboriginal football had nothing to do with it. Neither is supported.

Not Gaelic football

One theory can be dismissed with more confidence. The idea that Australian football descends from Gaelic football does not survive the chronology: the Gaelic Athletic Association codified Gaelic football in the 1880s, more than twenty years after the Melbourne rules. Geoffrey Blainey and other major historians reject the connection outright.

The two games do resemble each other, which is why they can play a hybrid international series. That resemblance comes from both codes solving similar problems — a large field, a round ball, catching allowed, no offside — rather than from either descending from the other.

From club rules to a competition

The ten rules were a single club's laws. Turning them into a sport took another thirty years.

Other Melbourne clubs formed through the 1860s, adopted the Melbourne rules with local variations, and then had to negotiate a common version in order to play each other. The Victorian Football Association was formed in 1877 to run the competition, and behinds were eventually added to the scoring so that matches could be separated. In 1897 eight clubs broke away to form the Victorian Football League, which is the direct ancestor of the AFL.

South Australia and Western Australia adopted the code early and developed their own strong competitions, which is why those states produced the clubs that entered the national competition a century later. The full story of that expansion belongs elsewhere, but the point for this page is that the 1859 rules were never a finished product — they were a starting position that every subsequent body amended.

The ground shaped the game

One structural point is worth making because it explains more than any rule.

The game was played on cricket grounds because cricket grounds were what Melbourne had. Cricket grounds are oval. An oval has no corners, no touchlines running parallel to each other and no natural place to form a defensive line, which reinforced the decision not to have an offside rule and made a spread, running game inevitable.

That is still true. Australian football is played on ovals of varying dimensions, which is why no two grounds are the same size and why home ground advantage in this sport includes the literal shape of the field. The MCG, Adelaide Oval and Optus Stadium are all cricket grounds that host football, and Marvel Stadium is a purpose-built rectangle-adjacent oval that is noticeably tighter than the rest.

What the founders would not recognise

If the four men from the Parade Hotel watched a match in 2026, most of it would be unfamiliar.

Eighteen players a side instead of forty. Timed quarters. Behinds. A professional list with a salary cap. Interchange rotations, with five players on the bench and no medical substitute after the 2026 change. An umpire throwing the ball up in the centre rather than bouncing it, the bounce having been abolished that same year. Score reviews, a tribunal, a national draft and a finals series that now runs to ten clubs with a wildcard round.

What they would recognise is a player catching a kick cleanly, raising an arm, and being given an unimpeded shot at goal. That is rule six, and it has survived everything.

Why the game stayed in Victoria and South Australia

One question the origin story answers by accident is why Australian football did not become the national winter code everywhere.

The rules were written in Melbourne in 1859 and spread through the networks Melbourne had: cricket clubs, schools, newspapers and the goldfields. South Australia and Western Australia were connected to those networks and adopted the code quickly, forming their own strong competitions within a generation. Tasmania did the same.

New South Wales and Queensland were not. Sydney's sporting establishment was oriented towards Britain more directly and took up rugby, which was codified in England and arrived with institutional backing. By the time Australian football tried to expand north, rugby was entrenched in the schools that mattered, and rugby league's split in 1907 gave the northern states a second code before the southern one had a foothold.

The result is a division that still holds more than a century and a half later. The rugby section covers the codes that took the north, and the comparison of league and union explains how they separated. That geographic split is not an accident of temperament — it is a consequence of which city wrote which rules first, and who they knew.

Where the story is commemorated

Yarra Park, the parkland beside the MCG where the 1858 match was played, carries a memorial marking the site. The Melbourne Cricket Ground itself holds the Australian Sports Museum, which covers the sport's beginnings alongside the rest of Australian sport.

Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College still play the Cordner-Eggleston Cup annually. Moyston in western Victoria maintains its claim as the birthplace of the game and marks it locally. And the Melbourne Football Club, which traces its origins to this period, is among the oldest football clubs of any code still operating anywhere.

What to read and what to re-check

Go to the primary material where you can. The AFL has published a transcription of the ten rules. Thompson's publication in the 1859 Victorian Cricketer's Guide is the earliest printing. Brough Smyth's 1878 volume and Dawson's 1881 volume are the nineteenth century sources for marngrook and both are available in digitised form.

For the modern debate, read Gillian Hibbins for the sceptical case and the 2016 Meanjin essay by Jenny Hocking and Nell Reidy for the case that the connection has been unfairly dismissed. Reading both is the only way to understand why this argument has lasted as long as it has.

Treat exact dates in August 1858 with mild caution, because the match ran across several days and contemporary newspaper accounts differ. And be careful with any source that states the origin question as settled in either direction — that is the clearest sign that it is not a source worth using.

Where to go next

For what the game became, the guide to AFL rivalries covers the club grudges that grew out of the Victorian district system, and the Anzac Day clash guide covers the single biggest fixture the sport now produces. The Victorian clubs guide and the non-Victorian clubs guide between them cover all eighteen clubs and where each came from.

The Australia section hub links the rest of these guides, and the sports index covers the other codes played in the same country, several of which arrived from Britain fully formed rather than being written in a pub in East Melbourne.